Neo noir: Monsieur Hire
Monsieur Hire is another perfect little movie much like Body Heat. Also like Body Heat, it is a movie that can be watched more than once. The first time you follow his story and the second time you follow hers. Finally, it also uses the camera flâneur rather than classic noir narration to pull us in.
It starts with a touch of narration and that is unfortunate. Unlike Kasdan, Patrice Leconte didn't have the courage to throw away the narrator from the detective story this movie is based on. Still, it's worth lingering on this narration because it gives us a clue to what the original story looked like; a clue about some parts that were cut out to streamline the story down so it would work as a movie.
The original story is by Georges Simenon who cranked these things out by the yard but was something of a genius nevertheless. The classic story about Simenon is that a friend of his called one day only to be told that M. Simenon couldn't come to the phone because he had just started writing a book. The friend said, "It's okay, I can wait." Simenon wrote so many books that no one knows how many books he wrote. We don't even know how many different pen names he used. And no one knows how many copies of his books have been sold (many, many millions of copies is as close as we can get).
The best of these books are among the best crime novels ever written.
The narration is odd because the man doing it, whom we will soon learn is a police detective, is overly sentimental about the murdered girl he is describing. He is an older man with silly romantic ideas about innocent young women at risk in a dangerous world. (The actress playing the victim was obviously chosen for her physical similarity to the femme fatale in our story.)
And how does he see himself? A knight come to battle evil.
This is a touch common to all Simenon plots. The detective must overcome some personal weakness in order to successfully figure out the criminal he is dealing with. In this film, this whole aspect gets dropped out of the story except for these few remnants here at the beginning. But it is worth considering for us analyzing the movie because the reason it is so compelling is that we suffer from the same flaws that the detective has. We have silly romantic ideas about beautiful young women.
The still living young woman who will draw our hero to his actual doom and us to our figurative doom is this woman:
Yes it's Sandrine Bonnaire. To have her look up at you with that expression would be, to use the current slang, epic. Okay, but a question for the guys (women can feel free to listen in just be discreet about it): Is there anything special you'd like to imagine her doing when she looks up at you with that look? I know, I know, how utterly typical of me. But you can imagine it can't you?
That's the odd thing about the innocence we think we see in women. It isn't innocent at all. I don't mean the obvious point that our intentions aren't innocent towards Sandrine here. That's true enough but we don't want her to be innocent either. Not really.
Back to our story or what have you
The narration is soon gone and that is a good thing because the movie can't really start until we get it offstage. As in Body heat what replaces it is the camera flâneur. This a loitering presence that seems to move impassively from disconnected scene to disconnected scene. All these scenes are carefully constructed to give us important details without giving us any narrative. We learn a lot about M. Hire the character.We learn that he is a loner who doesn't like people but that he is attracted to the innocent. We learn that he is romantic. We learn that he is a person of interest for the police regarding a recent murder. And we learn that he is a voyeur.
What we don't learn sitting in the dark watching, is that we are also voyeurs. There is almost no nudity in this movie and they're ought to have been even less. But what there is is a key fetish object (also shared with Body Heat). If you are one of the very few men who doesn't yet have a fetish for white satin bikini panties Sandrine Bonnaire will make sure you do by the time this is over. And it has to be white doesn't it; why they are the colour of innocence. But I'm not a voyeur just because I am sitting there in the dark watching a woman who can't see me ... no, no, of course not, the voyeur is a character in the movie.
And so it goes us watching as if we were like a camera with it's shutter open. The amazing thing is how long this goes on. In Palmetto and Body Heat we got about 8 minutes of this seemingly directionless stuff before the interaction between our hero and the femme fatale began. In M. Hire we get 17 minutes and 45 seconds. The trigger is that she catches him watching her.
BUT, no one reacts to that discovery the way they ought to. The girl does not call the police but tries to establish some sort of rapport with the man who has been watching her. He, however, does not welcome this which is even odder. The girl whom he has been watching is suddenly offering to make herself available to him and he is resisting. Why?
Well you have to watch the movie now.
The manliness lesson
There are some nice touches. At one point M. Hire tells a story and it is a classic Parisian urban myth about a little old lady who fed the pigeons and everyone loved only years later they realized she'd been poisoning the pigeons. M. Hire tells the story to a prostitute he is frequenting. The thing is that it is the mirror image of the story that M. Hire is constructing for himself. The little old lady is a smiling presence who is loved by everyone but secretly poisons pigeons. M. Hire is a man who never smiles and is hated by almost everyone but the big surprise he is trying to prepare is that he is really a romantic knight who will rescue the young girl and ride off to a secret romantic escape and happiness.
Nigra sum sed formosa. I am black but beautiful. Don't read that as a racial claim but as a claim about shame. In the original context (which is the Song of Songs from the Bible) the line is spoken by a woman who has a darker complexion that her friends. If you prefer, imagine her as the only girl in Grade 9 with zits. She is unfairly shamed because of issues she has no control over. But she isn't us, is she? Our problem isn't that we have been unfairly shamed but that we are sinners. That is the illusion. It's not that the world mistakes us for evil. We really are evil but still think we are somehow beautiful. A lot of the romantic delusion is a redemption story without a redeeming God and since this delusion has no God to play the godlike role we try to play it ourselves.
In the movie we have two romantic delusions running past one another. They are his story and her story. Both trade on the dream that there is a way to really connect with another human being that cuts past all the social BS.
M. Hire wants love and he lives in a world where you are stuck between two poles. One is the cold social world where he doesn't fit and the other is the world of illicit sex. That is crucial to the illusion.
You need three things to be mystic:
Her fantasy is the belief in the man who is the lonely outsider that only she can love, the rebel that no one else appreciates. It's a story played out in hundreds of trite pop songs. Like this one for example:
The thing is that the misguided angel is just a misguided angel. But her delusion is not about him. Her delusion is about her capacity to love; and it has to be about her love because he can't love. But she thinks everything is going to be alright because she can love him "enough for both of us". This is crazy of course. In real life, the misguided angel will neglect her and hurt her. If she marries him, he may beat her and her children and he might even kill her. Every murder-suicide you've ever read about was the work of a misguided angel.
But still the fantasies persist. In our different ways, men and women imagine there is a way to ignore all the social standards and find a shortcut to real love. Just the two of us against the world.
This can't end well. We know that right from the beginning.
But why? Is it the romantic dream that is tainted? I don't think so. Yes, it's crazy to think there is a short cut around the social norms. It's like someone who can't swim dreaming of walking on water.
But the thing is that M. Hire and Alice both can swim and so can we. The disabling thing is not the imagined dream but rather the imagined problem that leads us to crave the dream solution. To be loved, we need to be loveable but when we look at ourselves we seem damaged, lonely people. And damaged, lonely people don't get love. That's why we need the shortcut.
And changing our self image is no solution. That's just the craving for a shortcut in new language. To be loved we actually have to make ourselves better. There is no other way.
There is no shortcut. The only route to love is to become a socially and sexually successful person. That's the only sort of person who gets love and that is the only sort of person who can give love.
There will be an a post with the aesthetics of manliness from this move later today.
Monsieur Hire is another perfect little movie much like Body Heat. Also like Body Heat, it is a movie that can be watched more than once. The first time you follow his story and the second time you follow hers. Finally, it also uses the camera flâneur rather than classic noir narration to pull us in.
It starts with a touch of narration and that is unfortunate. Unlike Kasdan, Patrice Leconte didn't have the courage to throw away the narrator from the detective story this movie is based on. Still, it's worth lingering on this narration because it gives us a clue to what the original story looked like; a clue about some parts that were cut out to streamline the story down so it would work as a movie.
The original story is by Georges Simenon who cranked these things out by the yard but was something of a genius nevertheless. The classic story about Simenon is that a friend of his called one day only to be told that M. Simenon couldn't come to the phone because he had just started writing a book. The friend said, "It's okay, I can wait." Simenon wrote so many books that no one knows how many books he wrote. We don't even know how many different pen names he used. And no one knows how many copies of his books have been sold (many, many millions of copies is as close as we can get).
The best of these books are among the best crime novels ever written.
The narration is odd because the man doing it, whom we will soon learn is a police detective, is overly sentimental about the murdered girl he is describing. He is an older man with silly romantic ideas about innocent young women at risk in a dangerous world. (The actress playing the victim was obviously chosen for her physical similarity to the femme fatale in our story.)
And how does he see himself? A knight come to battle evil.
This is a touch common to all Simenon plots. The detective must overcome some personal weakness in order to successfully figure out the criminal he is dealing with. In this film, this whole aspect gets dropped out of the story except for these few remnants here at the beginning. But it is worth considering for us analyzing the movie because the reason it is so compelling is that we suffer from the same flaws that the detective has. We have silly romantic ideas about beautiful young women.
The still living young woman who will draw our hero to his actual doom and us to our figurative doom is this woman:
Yes it's Sandrine Bonnaire. To have her look up at you with that expression would be, to use the current slang, epic. Okay, but a question for the guys (women can feel free to listen in just be discreet about it): Is there anything special you'd like to imagine her doing when she looks up at you with that look? I know, I know, how utterly typical of me. But you can imagine it can't you?
That's the odd thing about the innocence we think we see in women. It isn't innocent at all. I don't mean the obvious point that our intentions aren't innocent towards Sandrine here. That's true enough but we don't want her to be innocent either. Not really.
Back to our story or what have you
The narration is soon gone and that is a good thing because the movie can't really start until we get it offstage. As in Body heat what replaces it is the camera flâneur. This a loitering presence that seems to move impassively from disconnected scene to disconnected scene. All these scenes are carefully constructed to give us important details without giving us any narrative. We learn a lot about M. Hire the character.We learn that he is a loner who doesn't like people but that he is attracted to the innocent. We learn that he is romantic. We learn that he is a person of interest for the police regarding a recent murder. And we learn that he is a voyeur.
What we don't learn sitting in the dark watching, is that we are also voyeurs. There is almost no nudity in this movie and they're ought to have been even less. But what there is is a key fetish object (also shared with Body Heat). If you are one of the very few men who doesn't yet have a fetish for white satin bikini panties Sandrine Bonnaire will make sure you do by the time this is over. And it has to be white doesn't it; why they are the colour of innocence. But I'm not a voyeur just because I am sitting there in the dark watching a woman who can't see me ... no, no, of course not, the voyeur is a character in the movie.
And so it goes us watching as if we were like a camera with it's shutter open. The amazing thing is how long this goes on. In Palmetto and Body Heat we got about 8 minutes of this seemingly directionless stuff before the interaction between our hero and the femme fatale began. In M. Hire we get 17 minutes and 45 seconds. The trigger is that she catches him watching her.
BUT, no one reacts to that discovery the way they ought to. The girl does not call the police but tries to establish some sort of rapport with the man who has been watching her. He, however, does not welcome this which is even odder. The girl whom he has been watching is suddenly offering to make herself available to him and he is resisting. Why?
Well you have to watch the movie now.
The manliness lesson
There are some nice touches. At one point M. Hire tells a story and it is a classic Parisian urban myth about a little old lady who fed the pigeons and everyone loved only years later they realized she'd been poisoning the pigeons. M. Hire tells the story to a prostitute he is frequenting. The thing is that it is the mirror image of the story that M. Hire is constructing for himself. The little old lady is a smiling presence who is loved by everyone but secretly poisons pigeons. M. Hire is a man who never smiles and is hated by almost everyone but the big surprise he is trying to prepare is that he is really a romantic knight who will rescue the young girl and ride off to a secret romantic escape and happiness.
Nigra sum sed formosa. I am black but beautiful. Don't read that as a racial claim but as a claim about shame. In the original context (which is the Song of Songs from the Bible) the line is spoken by a woman who has a darker complexion that her friends. If you prefer, imagine her as the only girl in Grade 9 with zits. She is unfairly shamed because of issues she has no control over. But she isn't us, is she? Our problem isn't that we have been unfairly shamed but that we are sinners. That is the illusion. It's not that the world mistakes us for evil. We really are evil but still think we are somehow beautiful. A lot of the romantic delusion is a redemption story without a redeeming God and since this delusion has no God to play the godlike role we try to play it ourselves.
In the movie we have two romantic delusions running past one another. They are his story and her story. Both trade on the dream that there is a way to really connect with another human being that cuts past all the social BS.
M. Hire wants love and he lives in a world where you are stuck between two poles. One is the cold social world where he doesn't fit and the other is the world of illicit sex. That is crucial to the illusion.
You need three things to be mystic:
- A distrust of ordinary language
- A binary opposition of good and evil
- A mystical faith in some special sort of experience that transcends all this
Her fantasy is the belief in the man who is the lonely outsider that only she can love, the rebel that no one else appreciates. It's a story played out in hundreds of trite pop songs. Like this one for example:
The thing is that the misguided angel is just a misguided angel. But her delusion is not about him. Her delusion is about her capacity to love; and it has to be about her love because he can't love. But she thinks everything is going to be alright because she can love him "enough for both of us". This is crazy of course. In real life, the misguided angel will neglect her and hurt her. If she marries him, he may beat her and her children and he might even kill her. Every murder-suicide you've ever read about was the work of a misguided angel.
But still the fantasies persist. In our different ways, men and women imagine there is a way to ignore all the social standards and find a shortcut to real love. Just the two of us against the world.
This can't end well. We know that right from the beginning.
But why? Is it the romantic dream that is tainted? I don't think so. Yes, it's crazy to think there is a short cut around the social norms. It's like someone who can't swim dreaming of walking on water.
But the thing is that M. Hire and Alice both can swim and so can we. The disabling thing is not the imagined dream but rather the imagined problem that leads us to crave the dream solution. To be loved, we need to be loveable but when we look at ourselves we seem damaged, lonely people. And damaged, lonely people don't get love. That's why we need the shortcut.
And changing our self image is no solution. That's just the craving for a shortcut in new language. To be loved we actually have to make ourselves better. There is no other way.
There is no shortcut. The only route to love is to become a socially and sexually successful person. That's the only sort of person who gets love and that is the only sort of person who can give love.
There will be an a post with the aesthetics of manliness from this move later today.
No comments:
Post a Comment